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Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459) recorded a tale about an uneducated priest who got his parish out of tempo with the rest of Christendom. The priest realized his mistake when he chanced upon some priests making the preparations for Palm Sunday while visiting a neighboring town. He hastened home and, summoning his flock, explained why fasting and penitence would be brief this year:

12th century manuscript leaf showing calendar for the month of June.

“Know this,” he explained. “Lent was slow this year due to the bad weather, and could not make the difficult journey over these mountains. Therefore, Lent approaches with a slow and weary step so that he brings now nothing more than a single week with him, with the remnants left along the road. In the limited time in which he will remain with you, confess all, and perform penitence.”

It is easy to sympathize with the priest when you look at one of the medieval calendars from our collections. They feature a complicated grid that coordinates four Interlocking cycles, enabling clerics to know when to celebrate the many moveable feasts of the liturgical year. On the far left in dark brown pigment there is a column of roman numerals running from i-xix. These are called the golden numbers, and indicate where a year falls the nineteen-year Metonic cycle. The cycle was named for the fifth-century Greek astronomer who discovered that the solar cycle has the same relationship to the lunar cycle every nineteenth year. The phases of the moon would occur on the same days in years with the same golden number. Incidentally, if you want to know the golden number for any year, all you do is divide the year by 19. The remainder + 1 gives you a year’s golden number. (The reason you need to add 1 is because the years are calculated from 1 BC.) The second column, with letters A-G, is used to find the dominical letter. The dominical letter was determined by the first Sunday of the new year. If it fell on January 1, the dominical letter for that year would be “A.” If it fell on January 2, it would be a “B.” on down to January 7. Since Sunday was on January 4 this year, the dominical letter for 2015 is “D.” Once you determined the golden number and the dominical letter, you could figure out the date of Easter, which occurred on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox.

The next column is the Julian calendar, which the Middle Ages inherited from Rome. The roman numerals in the 3rd column indicate how many days before Kalends, Nones, or Ides a day falls. This information was less functional, and may be merely a relic from Roman calendars that outlasted their usefulness. It could have been used for the sanctorale, or cycle of Saints’ days, which fell on fixed dates and were not reckoned from the date of Easter.

Lastly the column on the far right records the records the feast day to be celebrated that day. Each phrase begins with a decorated initial, usually an “s” for sancti, meaning “of saint…” The color of the initial serves more than a decorative purpose. The common dark brown pigments was used for common feasts. Whereas red or blue indicated that the feast was to be accompanied by more fanfare. In the calendar below, from late twelfth-century England, you can see that the last day of the octave of Ascension, the feast day of Saint Barnabus, the apostle, the sun’s entrance into cancer, the feast day of St. Aethelthryth, and the commemoration of the Apostle Paul are all given special distinction. Most astronomical information is recorded in green pigment.

Feast Days

Book historians are particularly interested in this column because it can provide information about the community who made and/or used the book. The addition or erasure of saints can also provide information about the dating of the manuscript.

The science of reckoning time, or computus, was a university subject in itself. Luckily for us, it resulted in some very attractive results. You can enjoy these calendar pages even if, like the hapless priest of Bracciolini’s story, you find computus all a bit of a bother.

A late 14th- or early 15th century calendar for the month of June

Mid-15th century calendar with notes on calculating the date for Easter

14th century Irish calendar for the month of December

Calendar for the month of may from an early 16th-century French book of hours

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Today we are featuring a manuscript draft made by Friedrich Otto Hultsch as he was editing Polybius’s Historiae. Hultsch (1833-1906) was a philologist of classical languages who published numerous critical editions throughout his career. He made the works of ancient mathematicians available to the scholarly world for the first time. He also wrote a monograph on ancient metrology that focused on Babylonian and Egyptian systems of weights and measures.

Polybius was a Greek historian who wrote in the second century B.C.E. His work was lost in the west until the fifteenth century. His work has continued to be of interest ever since as a witness of of Hellenistic Greek history and political theory and of the koine dialect of Greek.

To make the draft, Hultsch unbound the signatures of the previous edition of made by Emmanuel Bekker in 1844. He interleaved his own research notes, which included text from manuscripts not previously consulted. The draft is a monument to the resources of the human brain before computers.

The published edition came out in 1867 and is available in the open stacks. We are still researching the provenance of the draft. Perhaps one of his students or descendants immigrated to the United States and had some connection with the University of Missouri.

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He whose mind is in this condition should drink the juice of the tlahtlocotic root crushed in warm water so that he will vomit. A few days later both the bark and roots of the flowers yolloxochitl and cacauaxochitl are to be crushed in water; he is to drink the juice before lunch…His forehead, moreover, is to be anointed with the brain of a stag and the feathers of a dove, crushed and put in water, and human hair. On his neck he shall carry the stone found in the stomach of the swallow.

Plate 98 (left) and Plate 98, detail (right)

This remedy appears in a very special manuscript known as the Badianus Manuscript (Codex Barberini, Latin 241), now housed at the Vatican library. This manuscript was created in 1552 by two individuals of Aztec descent. One, Martinus de la Cruz, was a physician; the other, Badianus, rendered the former’s pharmacological knowledge into Latin. The manuscript, decorated with pigments made of native materials, is not only astoundingly beautiful, but an important witness to Aztec medicine at the time of the conquest. Special Collections owns a facsimile, edited by Emily Emmart.

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The semester's last manuscript of the week is from philosopher Bertrand Russell, whose birthday is on the 18th. These three original manuscripts contain the text of "How to become a philosopher," "How to become a logician," and "How to become a mathematician." They were later published in one volume by Haldeman-Julius Publications as nos. 7, 8, and 9 of The How-to series in 1942. E. Haldeman-Julius donated them to the Philosophy Section of the Missouri Academy of Science in March 1943. Find it in the MERLIN catalog.

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We think this week's post counts for manuscript Monday and maybe even miniature Monday too! This is a bifolium – a sheet folded to make two leaves, or four pages of text – from a very small prayer book in Dutch. It was produced in the Low Countries sometime during the fourteenth century. The dimensions of each page are 72 x 76 mm, or about 2.8 x 3 inches.

You can find more about this bifolium in the Digital Scriptorium. It's fragment number 128 in the Fragmenta Manuscripta Collection: a group of leaves, binding waste, and other manuscript fragments assembled by John Bagford in the seventeenth century.